actLocal - A Platform for Developing Localized Simulations to Support Interactive Learning about Climate Change

Despite the importance of addressing climate change, existing K-12 curricula struggle to make the urgency of the situation personally relevant to students. To help students learn about climate change and empower them to take action in their own communities, educational interventions need to help them understand the scientific process of climate change and strategies for mitigation and adaptation, the social and economic impacts of those strategies on people and communities, and the fact that young people have agency to effect meaningful change.

This project will thus address the most significant challenge in climate change education: making the abstract, global, and seemingly intractable problem of climate change concrete, local, and actionable for young people. The goal of this project is to develop and test actLocal, an online platform for K–12 teachers, students, and the public to easily create localized climate change adaptation simulations for any location in the contiguous United States.

These simulations will enable high school students and others to implement and evaluate strategies to address the impacts of climate change in their own communities.

This project will build a new educational technology that simulates the future impacts of climate change adaptations made now across a range of ecological and socioeconomic issues and related civic processes in a specific local context. actLocal is unique because students will be able to simulate the scientific and civic processes of land-use planning in their own communities and see the future impact on climate resilience. The project team hypothesizes that this localized, community-based focus will improve student learning about climate change and motivate students to take action in their own communities.

Researchers will test the extent to which this occurs using a convergent mixed-methods design. The simulation itself, as well as curricular supports and other pedagogical materials, will be co-designed with both teachers and students as active participants in the design process. Researchers will conduct both efficacy and effectiveness testing in a variety of educational contexts nationwide.

By providing teachers with the ability to construct localized climate change adaptation simulations, researchers will be able to study whether, how, and to what extent making climate change more personally relevant to students improves STEM and civic learning, including knowledge of and disposition toward climate change adaptation/ mitigation, self-efficacy, and civic engagement. This research will inform climate change education and improve understanding of how place-based simulations can best be used to make complex or abstract problems more concrete to students.

Thus, this project will identify best practices for designing and implementing STEM learning technologies that localize complex global problems, including pressing challenges in agriculture, energy, transportation, and public health.

The Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.